Veterans Administration hospitals have spent at least $420 million on solar panels and windmills while vets wait months — or even lay dying — to see a doctor.

In total, VA hospitals reported 23 deaths due to 76 instances of delayed care, an April 2014 VA fact sheet said. Then on June 5, Acting Veteran Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson revealed that at least 18 Phoenix patients died while waiting for treatment on a secret list kept off the books. It is not clear if that number is in addition to the 23 deaths reported earlier. During the past month, the scandal has resulted in the resignations of both the VA secretary and the leaders of its health care component.

According to a June 3 audit, 100,000 veterans had lengthy wait times for appointments. Of the nation’s 216 VA hospitals, 37 percent will require further investigation.

A whistleblower revealed Tuesday that seven of the patients listed on the Phoenix VA hospitals waiting list are already dead. That same Phoenix facility spent $20 million to build the nation’s largest solar carport. Phase one of the project was completed in 2011. The hospital also had an $11.4 million shortfall that year, an Inspector General’s report stated.

QOTD: "... the GOP Establishment and their paymasters have to win every battle in order to survive. We don’t. We only have to survive as an “army in being.” We will pick off incumbents (Cantor and Bennett) and prevent the elevation of establishment cronies (Dewhurst and Crist) and we will bleed them on a hundred battlefields in a war of attrition. The loss to senile adulterer Thad Cochran will be seen in retrospect as the time when the tide began to turn. The GOP establishment had to spend millions of dollars and they had to illegally recruit Democrat voters in order to haul Cochran’s moldering, putrescent near-corpse over the finish line. One has to wonder how many of their donors will pony up money in 2016 for another bloody round of primaries with the presidency in the balance." --Streiff

Sunday, June 29, 2014

During separate appearances on CNN’s “State of the Union with Candy Crowley,” House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and William Taylor, former IRS official Lois Lerner’s lawyer, offered contrasting thoughts on her role in a computer crash that destroyed two years worth of emails.

The IRS notified Congress earlier this month that Lerner, former head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax exempt division, and several other agency employees lost emails between January 2009 and April 2011 — the time period during tea party groups were subject to additional scrutiny by the IRS — due to a computer crash. In addition, hard drives housing those emails were destroyed after computer specialists rendered them irretrievable.

Issa accused Lerner’s attorney, Taylor, of having “said things and been not correct, or disingenuous, or outright lied a number of times” during a discussion about the lack of printed copies of Lerner’s lost e-mails with CNN host Candy Crowley. Lerner, Issa said, likely “broke some laws” by providing the Department of Justice with information on tea party and conservatives groups.

Taylor, however, defended his client and accused Republicans of playing “election-year politics.”

“It’s convenient to have a demon that they can create and point to,” Taylor said of the GOP’s treatment of Lerner.

IRS failed to notify Judicial Watch or the Court that it had “lost” emails in key lawsuit

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today filed a Motion for Status Conference, and within hours was granted a hearing in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to confer about the emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials, which were the subject of longstanding Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and a lawsuit, and which the IRS now claims to have “lost” (Judicial Watch v. IRS(No. 1:13-cv–1559)). The hearing is scheduled for July 10.

The emails Judicial Watch has sought since May 2013 cover portions of the same period for which the IRS on June 13, 2014, notified the House Committee on Ways and Means were lost or destroyed. Yet, according to the Motion for Status Conference, the IRS failed to notify either Judicial Watch or the court concerning the “lost” emails:

Plaintiff’s FOIA requests and the Committee’s request indisputably seek the same emails of Lois Lerner and the other IRS officials, including Nikole Flax, from January 1, 2010 to the present. Despite the obvious relevance, IRS has still not notified the Court or Plaintiff of the destruction of emails and whether the same issues relating to production of emails of Lois Lerner or the other six IRS officials exist in this lawsuit. Plaintiff only learned of the destroyed records on June 13, 2014, when the news media reported on the existence of IRS’s letter to Congress about the status of the emails.

In May 2013, Judicial Watch submitted four separate FOIA requests for IRS communications concerning the review process for organizations seeking tax exempt status. One of the FOIA requests specifically sought Lerner’s communications with other IRS employees and with any government or private entity outside the IRS regarding the review and approval process for 501(c)(4) applicants from January 1, 2010, to the present. A second request sought communications for the same time frame between the IRS and members of Congress and other government agencies, as well as any office of the Executive Branch. After the IRS failed to provide the information, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit on October 9, 2013.

The Judicial Watch Motion for Status Conference contends that its FOIA lawsuit led to the discovery of the “lost” emails:

As revealed in the announcement by the Committee, IRS confirmed that it first knew of the lost emails in February 2014. See Exhibit 3. This was during the same time frame IRS made its first production of responsive records to Plaintiff in this case on February 26, 2014. See IRS’ Status Update Report (ECF No. 15). The timing of these events reveals that the discovery of the supposedly lost emails was triggered by this lawsuit. However, IRS has still not informed this Court or Plaintiff regarding the missing emails in this litigation.

According to the Judicial Watch Motion, the IRS subsequently may have intentionally omitted material information from the court:

I'd want to get that coalition together now, early, before Jeb Bush gets any money and any support. I'd want to rebuild that Reagan coalition. So I'd be going to these groups right now. And the first thing I'd say to them: I'm going to run and run early.

And I'm to put Allen West on my VP ticket.

And then, for you libertarians, I'm going to make Rand Paul my Secretary of the Treasury and he can do what he damn well wants to the Federal Reserve and the IRS. He can take them down, abolish them, do what he wants.

And then you energy voters, Sarah Palin, Secretary of Energy. Drill, baby, drill, Drill in your backyard if you want to. Two dollar a gallon gas for every American family. Keystone pipeline, open it up!

And for the Christians, who often don't care about politics, but they do care about the education of their children, I'd say to them: vote for me this time and we will get rid of Common Core, we're going to get rid of the Department of Education, we're going to protect your home-schooling rights because David Barton will be Secretary of Education.

You could fill the whole cabinet, folks. Fill it now.

Would you rally to a team like that? Would you get out of bed every day, can't wait to get to the phone banks, and open your checkbook, and knock on doors to get those people in power.

And wouldn't it unify the base? Because everyone's getting something. You might not like Sarah Palin, but you love Allen West. You might not like John Bolton, but you like Rand Paul.

It's inspiring, with a clear policy direction. You know what you're going to get. Because where else do you work your butts off for a nebulous promise. We don't do it in business. We don't do it in our education. We know what we're going to get. That's why we work. With this team, we will work like nothing else.

And think about it, folks. You've never had a bigger team of Constitutionalists, conservatives, and libertarians, than you have today. Far more than Reagan had. And you've got all of these millions of people just itching to save their country. You've got all of these leaders out there that can't wait to gut the federal government.

You put the base with the leaders and who is going to stand in your way? Imagine, right now, you put your eggs in one basket. And they can demonize a Mitt Romney. Try and demonize 20 hard-core, Constitutional conservatives, a bunch of Rottweilers, who don't take any crap from anyone... who are all backing each other up.

You've got a team, folks. You win football with a good team. Why not win politics that way? Because you've done it before.

You didn't have a founding father, guys. You didn't just have George Washington. You had George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin and James Madison.

It was a team that won the first American Revolution and you need a team to win the Second American Revolution.

QOTD: "Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Karl Rove, Thad Cochran, Haley Barbour, the NRSC, et al, must answer for this [the race-baiting ads supporting Cochran]. To say they were not involved in blatantly racist behavior is not good enough. They’ve yet to condemn this activity let alone demand that those behind it be exposed." --Mark Levin

The National Insurance Crime Bureau’s (NICB) “Hot Spots” report examines vehicle theft data obtained from the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) for each of the nation’s metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs)...

...Although California tends to place high in this report, this is the first time that California has held nine of the top 10 spots for MSAs with the highest per capita vehicle theft rates. In 2012, it held eight and in 2011, seven.

And, even if illegal immigration had something to do with this uncomfortable fact, they're doing it for love, according to Jeb Bush.

So, by all means, let's pass Amnesty and incentivize even more unvetted individuals to break into the U.S.

We have a lot of work to do in the months ahead before the midterm elections. In races across the country, there are proud conservative candidates waiting for the chance to step up and lead. And a Senate majority will do the most to deliver on our promise to lead the country back to prosperity.

Meeting our monthly goals is essential to having the resources needed to compete. Senator Rob Portman has offered to triple-match your donation – which means that every dollar you donate is worth $4 to the NRSC.

In case you’re wondering, the answer is yes: The NRSC is indeed the same establishment group that spent $800,000 turning out Democrats to pick the Republican nominee in Mississippi earlier this week by, among other things, labeling the actual conservative candidate and his supporters as racists. And now they want me to give them money to help fund their efforts to employ Democrat voters — and tactics — to support "proud conservative candidates waiting for the chance to step up and lead" like … big-spending pork king Thad Cochran. I think not.

QOTD: "We have Obama because of the establishment. Those of you who still can’t see that are admitting to blindness while asking us to follow your lead.

There is absolutely no honor in supporting a team whose management refuses to make changes when better position players come along. Worse still, they actively look to injure said players while lecturing us about the importance of team. So for people who keep crying that we “Teasters” are “sore losers,” let me just say that we seldom hear the same charges when the “hard-nosed politicians who know how to play the game right” reject the wills of their supposed constituencies. Or maybe I’m just imagining Murkowsky or Lugar or Specter or Crist or Castle or Rove, etc." --Jeff Goldstein

Friday, June 27, 2014

If you haven't seen the film Road Warrior at least a dozen times, I'm guessing you're a Soviet sleeper spy. The movie depicts a dystopian future in which gasoline is among the most precious of commodities and vicious gangs roam the land. In other words, somewhat like Chicago, but with fewer guns.

In any case, watching the vicious chase scenes, fight scenes, and crazy stunts, I got myself to wondering: how many people were killed filming this insanely awesome movie?

Steve Bisley denied this "myth" in a Japanese motorcycle magazine interview, which was held about ten years ago. He claimed that two stunt men were injured during the film shoot, but none of them sustained serious injuries. He also noted that this "myth" maybe created by the film's distributor as a promotional purpose.

Scandal: The Internal Revenue Service admits it broke the law after an organization whose private tax data are illegally shared with an ideological competitor wins its lawsuit. So who is going to prison for this federal crime?

If IRS Commissioner John Koskinen wants to know which criminal statutes have been broken, he might try reading about one in the morning newspapers, the same place President Obama gets his information about the "phony scandal" du jour.

The National Organization for Marriage has been awarded a $50,000 settlement from the IRS after the agency admitted wrongdoing in leaking the organization's 2008 tax return and the names and contact information of major donors. The information was forwarded from the IRS to the pro-gay marriage group Human Rights Campaign. That group then posted the data on its website during the 2012 presidential campaign. Unauthorized dissemination of such information is a felony.

At that time, Joe Solmonese, a left-wing activist and Huffington Post contributor, was the president of the Human Rights Campaign. Solmonese also became a 2012 Obama campaign co-chairman. As Matthew Boyle has reported at Breitbart News, this information was used to attack Mitt Romney during the election campaign, according to the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes Obama's stance on gay marriage.

The Huffington Post used the leaked documents in a story questioning Romney's support for traditional marriage. The documents showed Romney donated $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage.

Names and addresses of National Organization for Marriage donors — contained in a Form 990 Schedule B, which the organization is required to file with the IRS but is not public information — were to be used in the kind of bullying campaign commonly employed by liberal groups.

The prospect of donor names and addresses being made public is also useful in drying up financial support for conservative groups.

Dan from New York writes, "The end stages of dementia are incurable and terminal (contagious too)."

June 26, 2014

In Narrow Ruling, Supreme Court Invalidates 3 Obama Appointments

by Krishnadev Calamur

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that three appointments President Obama made in 2012 to the National Labor Relations Board are not valid because they were not approved by the Senate, which was in pro forma session at the time.

In a unanimous decision, the justices said the Constitution's recess-appointments clause gave Congress the power to decide when it is in recess, and that there was no recess when Obama acted. The case is National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning...

The news was filled last week with breathless headlines: “Scott Walker part of ‘criminal scheme,’” declared The Washington Post. The Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Journal Sentinel, which is intimately familiar with the facts of this case, nonetheless headlined “John Doe prosecutors allege Scott Walker at center of ‘criminal scheme.’” The New York Times, all the networks, CNN, MSNBC, Time.com and all the other usual suspects chimed in with a deafening cacophony of alarm, using the same “Walker at center of criminal scheme” headlines. Even Forbes took the bait.

In a year saturated with false, misleading or downright fraudulent misreporting from the left-wing biased mass media, this disgraceful bit of propaganda vies for first place. The court documents in this formerly secret investigation were not new, and the case has been thrown out of court and declared illegal, not once but twice.

Not only were the same headlines used, but most news outlets used the same dishonest technique to make this old information sound like it was breaking news. Politico’s lead paragraph reads:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker participated in a “criminal scheme” to coordinate fundraising for Republicans trying to beat back efforts to recall him and state senators from office, local prosecutors argue in court documents released Thursday.

Politico lies. By stating it in the present tense as, “prosecutors argue in court documents released Thursday,” Politico implies the allegations are current. These documents are from last year and have only been unsealed because these same prosecutors are now being sued by their former victims for their rampant abuse of the legal system.

QOTD: "Hillary Clinton berated President Barack Obama as ‘incompetent and feckless' and said he had become 'a joke' after having one too many glasses of wine at a reunion dinner last year with friends from college, a new tell-all book reveals.

'When her friends asked Hillary to tell them what she thought — really thought — about the president she had served for four draining years, she lit into Obama with a passion that surprised them all,' former Newsweek editor Edward Klein writes in his book Blood Feud.

'"The thing with Obama is that he can’t be bothered and there is no hand on the tiller half the time,"' Clinton is said to have barked in her boozy rant. ‘That’s the story of the Obama presidency. No hand on the f***ing tiller ... Obama has turned into a joke," she said sharply... "The IRS targeting the Tea Party, the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records and James Rosen’s emails — all these scandals. Obama’s allowed his hatred for his enemies to screw him the way Nixon did,"' Clinton reportedly told her pals.

'She went on to explain that Bill was a natural leader and great executive, unlike Obama, who was in her words "incompetent and feckless,"' Klein writes... At another point in the conversation Hillary is quoted as having said of Obama, 'You can’t trust the motherf***er' ... 'Obama has treated Bill and me incredibly shabbily. And we’re angry,'" Clinton continued." --Francesca Chambers

Thursday, June 26, 2014

This 1946 photograph shows ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), the first general purpose electronic computer - a 30-ton machine housed at the University of Pennsylvania. Developed in secret starting in 1943, ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. The completed machine was announced to the public on February 14, 1946. The inventors of ENIAC promoted the spread of the new technologies through a series of influential lectures on the construction of electronic digital computers at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, known as the Moore School Lectures. (AP Photo)

Suffice it to say that when Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, Haley Barbour and the rest of the Beltway hacks want to leak information to the outside world, they prefer the Democrat press release service called Politico. Just hours ago, Alexander Burns revealed the brilliant slash-and-burn strategy of The Architect™ and Friends.

Establishment-aligned groups have already spent some $23 million on independent expenditures propping up favored House and Senate candidates in contentious primaries...

...The scope of the effort to suppress activist-backed candidates has been broader and costlier than is widely understood, covering at least 20 House and Senate primaries ... [t]he loose coalition of establishment forces encompasses two dozen advocacy groups, industry associations and super PACs that have raised and spent millions on behalf of Washington’s chosen candidates.

Nearly a third of the establishment money has come from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The business lobby’s spending in this year’s toughest primaries has about equaled the $7 million that the conservative Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund have spent together on the most fractious elections — excluding races, like the Senate campaigns in Arkansas and Alaska, where there’s been no meaningful clash between establishment-sanctioned outside groups and the activist right.

And the $23 million figure isn’t even close to a full accounting of what D.C.-backed candidates spent to win their nomination fights. Candidates themselves, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, have collectively spent tens of millions more from their campaign accounts.

Top Republican strategists and party officials say they have no regrets about going all-in against flawed primary candidates. In a perfect world, they say, the whole expensive ordeal would be unnecessary. With conservative outside groups routinely bumping off incumbent lawmakers and prized recruits, it’s simply the cost of doing business — now and perhaps for the foreseeable future.

According to a new Pew Research Center study, only 40 percent of consistently liberal Americans say they often feel proud to be Americans.

The other 60 percent say that doesn’t describe them. [...]

By contrast, more than seven in 10 “steadfast conservatives” and eight in 10 “business conservatives” say they are generally proud to be Americans.

The poll results also show that only half of liberals see themselves as “typical Americans.”

The poll also shows many liberals don’t liken themselves to your average American. Just 51 percent say they feel as though they are ”typical Americans” — as compared to three-quarters of conservatives and at least two-thirds of all the other groups.

Don't these feelings strike you as both utterly bizarre and stunningly ungrateful? These Democrats are blessed to live in the greatest country on Earth; the most beneficent, charitable and opportunity-rich society in the history of the planet.

In little more than two hundred years, Americans empowered the individual; defeated slavery, Nazism, military Shintoism and Communism; refined mass production; invented human flight; created 75% of all medical innovations on the planet; put a man on the moon; invented the telephone, the Internet and the search engine; and advanced humankind in millions of other ways, in every field and endeavor.

On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment crossed the Rubicon and then burned the bridge to cinders. It is now clear, thanks to leaks to Politico and a gloating editorial in The Wall Street Journal by Karl Rove, that the entrenched GOP establishment resorted to the most despicable tactics imaginable to prop up the pathetic, barely coherent incumbent Thad Cochran.

WAR: THE MURKOWSKI PLAYBOOK

Truly disgusted, I thought to myself: why not use their own tactics against them? After incumbent Beltway RINO Lisa Murkowski lost her GOP primary in 2010 to Joe Miller, she ran in the general election as a write-in candidate. She won, becoming the first to win as a Senate write-in in 50 years.

I don't believe in sitting out elections. There are fairly conservative Senate candidates running in several states, and it would be a mistake to abandon them on the battlefield.

That said, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) must both be made to pay a heavy price for their unconscionable actions.

WRITE IN CHRIS McDANIEL, CRUSH THAD COCHRAN

Chris McDaniel has a viable legal challenge against Cochran's outrageous victory. Had only Republicans voted in the, er, Republican primary, McDaniel would have won in a crushing landslide, by approximately 25,000 votes. As it turns out, however, more than 30,000 Democrats voted in the GOP primary, many of them illegally. Those Democrats who voted in the primary several weeks ago and voted again in the Republican primary broke state law.

Please contact Chris by calling his campaign office at 601-283-2156 or by email at info@mcdaniel2014.com and urge him to run.

He deserves to win -- and he can win.

WRITE-IN MATT BEVIN, CRUSH MITCH McCONNELL

Mitch McConnell needs to go. It is his hidden hand that is behind a range of attacks on conservatives, both overt and covert.

I urge you to contact Matt Bevin and ask him to file as a write-in candidate in Kentucky (he has until 24 October to do so, but obviously the sooner the better). I've already done so, asking him on Twitter.

IF THE GOP WANTS WAR, IT IS WAR THEY WILL GET

McConnell and Cochran must be defeated. I urge you, rather than sitting it out, to support their write-in opponents.

QOTD: "Obama wanted out of Iraq, and ran in 2008 with a promise to do just that. A year after the troop pullout, during a 2012 debate, Mitt Romney said he wanted a residual force to remain. Obama pointedly disagreed, saying that leaving “10,000 troops in Iraq … would tie us down.”

Incredibly, Obama now blames the Iraqis for his refusal to leave any troops. Obama says he wanted legal protection for the soldiers left behind and that Iraq’s parliament would not provide it. So Obama happily walked away, blaming it on “a decision made by the Iraqi government” to reject the offer of “a modest residual force.” Obama sure had no difficulty in quickly working out an agreement — via diplomatic notes, without the approval of Iraq’s parliament — for the recently promised 300 “advisers.”" --Larry Elder

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Scandal: The IRS canceled a contract with an email storage contractor weeks after Lois Lerner reported lost personal files and before other IRS officials had their hard drives crash as Tea Party-targeting investigations began.

Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law.

Lerner's computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS concealed from the American public and congressional investigators for two years.

This event, which cannot be verified because her hard drive has since been destroyed and recycled, occurred just 10 days after House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups.

This shouldn't have been a problem because, as the Daily Caller reports, the IRS had a contract beginning in 2005 with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, Calif.

The company advertises that it provides "Email Archiving Done Right" and "Point-Click Recovery" and in a 2009 tweet boasted: "The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why wouldn't you choose them to protect your servers?"

Perhaps this is what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was referring to when in March testimony before the House Oversight Committee he assured Rep. Jason Chaffetz that the reason requested emails were difficult to provide was that IRS emails "get taken off and stored in servers."

Later we would be told that the emails were lost forever and, as we noted, Koskinen was lying in March, when he said they were somewhere, or in June, when he said they were nowhere to be found. Let us ponder another possibility: that the emails were taken off and stored in Sonasoft servers, emails that would be deleted when the IRS contract for their storage ended. They were not lost, but, in effect, deliberately destroyed.

Last November Pope Francis issued an exhortation entitled Evangelii Gaudium in which he made the following assertions about Islam:

In order to sustain dialogue with Islam, suitable training is essential for all involved, not only so that they can be solidly and joyfully grounded in their own identity, but so that they can also acknowledge the values of others, appreciate the concerns underlying their demands and shed light on shared beliefs. We Christians should embrace with affection and respect Muslim immigrants to our countries in the same way that we hope and ask to be received and respected in countries of Islamic tradition. I ask and I humbly entreat those countries to grant Christians freedom to worship and to practice their faith, in light of the freedom which followers of Islam enjoy in Western countries! Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.

As has been reported here at length over the past couple of weeks (see the list of links at the bottom of this post), a Muslim imam was invited to participate in the “prayer for peace” event at the Vatican on June 8. The esteemed alumnus of Al-Azhar University went off-script, however, and asked Allah to help him gain victory over the unbelievers.

The Vatican at first denied that any such thing had happened, and an edited video of the event was released that supported their denial. However, as we reported last week, the end of Sura 2 Verse 286 from the Koran that the imam quoted — which had been judiciously removed from the publicized version — was most assuredly included in the cleric’s Arabic-language prayer.

To provide context for this momentous event, the following information is instructive. Regular readers should bear with me; I know you’ve seen this all before.

’Umdat al-salik wa ’uddat al-nasik, or The reliance of the traveller and tools of the worshipper is commonly referred to as Reliance of the Traveller when cited in English.

This an authoritative source on Sunni Islamic law, because it is certified as such by Al-Azhar University in Cairo. There is no higher authority on Sunni Islamic doctrine than Al-Azhar; it is the closest equivalent to the Vatican that can be found in Islam.

Consider this passage from Reliance of the Traveller, chapter O, o9.0: